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It has sure been a busy weekend around here. We had my sister-in-law and her family over this weekend. It was a good weekend of visiting, playing with our nieces and nephews, and eating some delicious food. While I love weekends like this one, they are a lot of work.

When you consider that we started cleaning the house about a week ago in anticipation of their arrival, you know that we had been busy the entire week. We even had the kids helping us clean, and while there was quite a bit of work involved, we did manage to get everything done like we always do.

Now that they have finally left, we have a moment to ourselves, so the wife and I are going to sit down and have a cup of tea.

For us, drinking any one of the unique blends of premium tea that we have in our home is a great way to relax. We buy our tea from ThaoTeaCo.com, and it is the only company that we have found that carries tea that we both enjoy. We are sitting in the living room right now, trying to wind down from this weekend.

The tea is warm and delightful to my taste buds. While I know that I will have to go to bed soon, I will savor this moment while I can.

I’m drinking delicious tea and I have great company – a guy couldn’t ask for a better way to end his day.

While I was initially gung-ho about taking computer science in college, I was starting to run out of passion for my classes. I’m only in first year, but I thought that there would be more discussion about computer science topics instead of just coding. Unfortunately for me, it has been nothing but coding and more coding.

Which can get rather boring.

I was really thinking about throwing in the towel, but I was pleasantly surprised with our class on Friday. Our professor was away for whatever reason and their was a substitute speaker. I was just about to leave the class when he said something rather unexpected:

It was the first time that any of us had the opportunity to discuss anything other than programming languages and methodologies. The entire class was actually looking at computing from a macro level instead of the micro level we tend to look at as programmers.

The discussion continued and the speaker provided example of real-world uses for cloud computing. I really felt my eyes opened for the first time since I started college.

It was very refreshing.

I just hope that we have more of these lively discussions – I really felt I learned something in that class.

For most of my life, I have tried to be an environmentally conscious person. I make sure to recycle, watch the amount of garbage we put out each week and turn off the lights when I leave the room. But one of the things that I have noticed over the last year is that our power bill continues to get a little more expensive each month.

So, I decided to investigate.

What I discovered was that we have been using our air conditioner more than we used to because our home is hot. Keeping the temperature down does come with a price, and we were certainly paying it.

But I knew we could do better.

So, I did a little research as to how we could keep our home cooler so that we would have to depend on the air conditioner less than we did now. As it turned out, one of the easiest ways was to get the windows tinted on our home. By tinting them, it would keep out much of the heat from the sun, and therefore mean that we would not have to run our air conditioner as often.

I contacted Ozone Tint, a company specializing in home window tinting in Melbourne. They came out, assessed our home and gave us a quote. We accepted and they did the work.

While it hasn’t been that long since they tinted our windows, it is already noticeably cooler in our home and I would expect that our utility bills will be lower as well.

While I am thankful that our baseboard heaters kept us warm for many winters, it is time for them to go. They are old, dirty, and mostly don’t work well any longer. I don’t particularly like the power bill when I get it during the winter months as the setup i have isn’t very energy efficient.

But I was sure that there would be something on the market that could provide heat to my home without requiring me to spend a whole lot of money. Unfortunately, when I asked my friends about what I should do, they all had blank looks on their faces – I guess they didn’t know either.

So, I decided to consult with experts and see what my best choice would be. After explaining our situation to a salesperson, it turned out that we should use electric radiators. Not only do these new radiators generate more heat than those old baseboards, but they also do it while using less electricity. They also fit seamlessly into the spot that was vacated from the dishwasher.

They were perfect.

If you are looking for a way to heat your home, trailer, or cabin that is cost effective and reliable, an electric radiator would be a good fit for you. Learn more here http://www.haverland.co.uk/

As many of you know, I spend a lot of time building websites. I have a small portfolio of sites that are chalk-full of useful information and articles designed around a great user experience. I suppose that I am drawn to these types of websites because I love to write.

But like any other website, they need to be optimized for the search engines and marketed to get some good rankings and traffic. While I love writing and creating sites, I am not a big fan of marketing them. Since the marketing landscape online is changing all of the time, it makes it hard to continue creating sites while keeping up with the latest marketing trends.

I don’t have a lot of time, so I decided it was time that I found a good SEO provider.

I contacted a number of companies that I found online to see what they would suggest that I do to market my existing websites and how they could help me market my new ones.

Based on their responses, I narrowed my list down to three.

But only one of them made the cut.

You see, I decided to go with ByteMe.cc to be my SEO service provider. They provided me with sound advice, and the strategies that they suggested and implemented got me some great results: many of my keyword terms were on the first page and in top positions in a very short amount of time.

I loved that they had patience to answer my questions and they could explain what was being done in plain English instead of a bunch of technical jargon.

All-round it was a great experience. In fact, if you have a website and you are looking for help to get it noticed, get great rankings, and traffic, Byte Me would be the perfect SEO provider for you. To learn about the marketing packages that they offer visit their site http://byteme.cc/

When it came to having kids, my wife and I didn’t really know what we were doing. Sure, we could say that we had held babies in the past, but playing with a baby and taking care of one are two different things. But we knew that we could figure things out if we just tried.

It didn’t take us long to get into a groove when our first child was born. Sure, we didn’t get a lot of sleep, but what parent does when their baby is little?

One of the things that we learned early on was that it was important to have the right tools for the job. For example, having a good nursery glider made it easier to get the baby to go back to sleep. For us, we did a lot of research to find the best products on the market for our child. We really didn’t want to waste money on shoddy products, so spending the time doing the research was important.

Money has been a little tight for awhile now, and we have been trying to cut corners where we can. Instead of driving to work, we’ve been taking the bus, bringing bagged lunches to work instead of eating out and turning the heat down at night. But try as we might not to spend money, there are times where you just can’t avoid spending it.

A great example would be our car.

While we don’t use it a lot, there are times when we need it to take the kids to Tae Kwon Do, or we might need to take them to the doctor. In these instances, it makes more sense to drive than try to get around on the bus.

But a vehicle needs to be maintained and unfortunately we haven’t been good at keeping up with the maintenance on the car. I was hoping that we wouldn’t have to spend any money on it, but after we had a flat tire that couldn’t be fixed, we had to get new tires for the car.

We didn’t have money for that.

But being the thrifty woman that I am, I wend online and found some tire rack coupons that allowed us to save enough money that getting the new tires wasn’t going to make us broke. I just love how you can save a lot of money if you take the time to find a great deal.

I don’t know how we would have survived as long as we have without coupons – they have been a life saver for us.

Many things are bringing light to the Tampa Bay area, including the new design of the St. Petersburg pier. I’m a big technology enthusiast but Robert Nikic, a 24 year young local Tampa entrepreneur has got me stumped. Tampa’s known to be a business-centric city and to host many successful business owners that help drive the local economy. But, not under the age of 30. After reading an article on the Huffington Post which Robert Nikic was featured on, my view changed a bit.

My tendered interest with internet-based businesses in Tampa is heavy with a primary focus on App based businesses. Yet has a hosting and website design business caught my sheer eye simply because of the vast amount of decline in change or innovation. It’s either the latest website builder with the ability of updating your website through your iPhone or a website design firm that’s based on initial consultations. Robert Nikic, the CEO of Herolocity has earned recognition of being Tampa’s top internet innovator in my eyes.

Here’s why:

Herolocity is a considerably new company that has decided to make change in the industry, thankfully. Let’s use a restaurant in this example, with Herolocity’s Instasite Business service, it would allow that restaurant to have a branded website created by an experienced designer in which the restaurant owner could make full-fledged changes on its rigorous platform. With hundreds of website applications to choose from, the Food Delivery App allows restaurant eaters to order food online in a few clicks while the restaurant’s kitchen is alerted in real-time.

They’ve managed to create a solution that would cost a restaurant in this example thousands of dollars and turn it into a low monthly subscription which includes over 10+ additional services. Worth mentioning is that InstaSite Business is still in its early stages and it is updated frequently.

Moreover, they’ve become such a generous company. A solution allowing OTHER designers to cut the time and cost of creating a website by over 350% is cooking in the oven. With this type of move of enabling other designers, Herolocity’s goal seems to help business owners with an alternative of incorporating features into websites that business owners actually use without having to spend thousands of dollars. Now expanding that ability to other designers, the opportunities are limitless.

Really… It’s Your Path Your Choice…

Congratulations Robert Nikic, my recommendation of you being Tampa’s Top Innovator is well earned.

When it comes to an investment strategy for my portfolio, many banks would say that I am an aggressive investor. The truth is that I am looking for real growth to my net worth, and if it means that I need to be a little riskier with my investments, so be it.

But that doesn’t mean that I am being stupid with my money. I’m only really putting a portion of my money on the line just in case everything doesn’t work out the way I plan. I suppose that is how I live my entire life, never committing my entire self to anything (but that can be a post topic for the future).

I have been dabbling with day trading for some time, and I’ve recently started using trading software to help me maximize my returns. The software puts all the information that I need to analyze in an easy to understand format so that I can make investment decisions by looking at a computer screen.

It makes things a lot easier for me.

So far, the software has allowed me to grow my portfolio by a fair margin this year, and I am hoping that it continues to do so. If my gains continue as they have been, I’ll be able to hit my goal of retiring by forty.

Working the night shift isn’t for everyone, but since I have been a nightowl since I was born, it is the perfect job for me. Things are pretty quiet at this time of night for me at the front desk of this hotel, but thankfully management allows us to bring a computer or tablet to use to keep ourselves entertained at night. Honestly, it is really just there to keep us awake and these little pieces of technology do a pretty good job.

But working the night shift can get very lonely. When you consider that I don’t see a lot of chatty people at night (since most of them are trying to get to bed), there are some days where I don’t even get to speak to a soul.

And if you ask me, that isn’t healthy.

So, I have found a free online chatting app that has allowed me to make some friends with other people around the world. Whenever I feel lonely at work I know that I can use my Swift Chat app to connect with people and have someone to talk to.

To learn more about Swift Chat app and how you can connect to thousands of people from around the world, visit SwiftChatApp.com